The Vampire School | Anthony Esolen | Catholic World Report
The Vampire School drains the life out of learning, producing dull workers for the Vampire State.
“Schools, I
hear it argued, would make better sense and be better value as nine-to-five
operations or even nine-to-nine ones, working year-round. We’re not a farming community anymore, I
hear, that we need to give kids time off to tend the crops. This new-world-order schooling would serve
dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, and a
whole range of other services, which would convert the institution into a true
synthetic family for children, better than the original one for many poor kids,
it is said—and this would level the playing field for the sons and daughters of
weak families.
“Yet it appears to me as a schoolteacher that schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities. They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop—then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.” (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
One day it struck John Taylor Gatto, Teacher of the Year for New York State in 1991 (and therefore, inevitably, disliked by his administrators), that our schools were not failing. Rather, they were succeeding fabulously at what they were constructed to do: to produce dull and compliant workers in a technocratic economy. School, he argued, instills in us a perpetual childish neediness. We need to toady for grades, because we need to get into the “best” schools, because we need to have a prestigious and well-remunerated job, because we need to buy a lot of stuff to pretend to fill the emptiness of our lives. Among that stuff will be the odd child or two, who will also need to toady for grades, to get into the “best” schools, and so on, world without end, Amen.
The Vampire State naturally requires a Vampire School. Recall the two things everybody needs to know about vampires.
Ivan Illich had a similar analysis 35 years ago.
Posted by: Rachelle | Sunday, April 07, 2013 at 06:19 AM